


Underdog

by MagpieWendigo



Category: Charlie Countryman (2013)
Genre: Abuse, Backstory, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Crying, Domestic Violence, F/M, Grooming, Implied miscarriage, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, I’m making this up as I go along, M/M, Miscarriage, Neglect, Other, Parent-Child Relationship, Smoking, Smoking In Hospitals, Substance Abuse, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, baby nigel (Charlie Countryman), child crying, family life, it was the early 60s in Romania, nigel whothefuckareyou, reference to childbirth, selective mutism, spousal abuse, teen mom - Freeform, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2020-12-07 21:50:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieWendigo/pseuds/MagpieWendigo
Summary: This is an entirely fictional backstory for Nigel- potential slices of his life growing up that help us better understand the man we meet in Bucharest.





	1. Puppy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jordyn And Lux](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jordyn+And+Lux).
**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an entirely fictional backstory for Nigel- potential slices of his life growing up that help us better understand the man we meet in Bucharest.

If anyone had ever bothered to ask Nigel about his earliest human memory (so long as he was deep in his cups), he would probably tell them that he remembers sunlight. The way October feels when you close your eyes, warm, golden, accompanied by the melancholy smell of decaying leaves. He might even wax poetic on the sound of his mother’s voice. And while he does remember these things, like glimpses of blue sky through prison bars, what he really remembers is pain. Of course, he’d never admit that to anyone, least of all himself. 

The first words his mama ever said to him were “will you please shut the fuck up?” and he did, and that just about tells you everything you need to know about their relationship. She handed the wailing and bloody baby to one of the nurses and asked for a cigarette. She was young and alone, not only single but a single _ mother _ now, and could you blame her? All she wanted was a goddamn cigarette and could you PLEASE make that bastard child stop crying?!!

Her ash blonde hair stuck to her face in sweaty clumps which she pushed away with the back of her hand holding the cigarette. The nurse returned with the baby boy, now clean and quiet, wrapped in a pale blue blanket with brown and white dachshunds printed on one side. Andrea Maria Ionescu ashed her cigarette into a styrofoam cup full of ice chips and stared in wide-eyed wonder at the sleeping angel nestled in her arm. _ I’m not ready to be a mother, _she thought. She was only 17. 

“Miss?” 

“Hm?” Andrea looked up to see yet another nurse, this one with a clipboard and pen at the ready. 

“Your son’s name, Miss Ionescu?”

_ My son. _She looked down at him and thought of her father. “Constantin,” she said. “Nigel Constantin Ionescu.”

———

From the moment he was born, Nigel was absolutely devoted to his mother. Their first years together passed in relative calm, though he spent more time with his grandmother, Milena, since mama was always busy. But all day, little Nigel thought of nothing but mama, making her drawings, wondering what she was having for lunch, watching the clock for 6pm when he would go and sit by the front door like an obedient dog, waiting for Andrea to come home. Sometimes she walked through the door, sometimes she didn’t. 

“_Cățeluș_!” She exclaimed his pet name with great joy, every night she came home. “How’s my puppy?”

Nigel beamed at her with pure adoration, reaching for her with tiny hands. She loved the way his hazel brown eyes lit up when he looked at her. Andrea kicked off her loafers and scooped up Nigel, smothering his chubby cheeks with kisses. These moments were the only moments in her life she ever felt truly loved- but that was a secret she took to her grave. 

Milena stood in the kitchen of their tiny apartment, observing this tender interaction between her daughter and grandson with a full heart. “How was school, _fiică dragă_?” she called out. 

“Fine, mama,” Andrea replied, setting Nigel back onto the floor. He clung to her hem and waddled silently after her into the kitchen. 

“Mimi,” Nigel wanted to say. Mama was mama, mama’s mama was mimi. But since his first cries in the hospital three years ago, Nigel barely made any noise at all, though Milena sometimes found him humming to himself while he played with his blocks or puzzles. It was his thinking noise. 

Nigel discovered early on that making too much noise meant mama got loud, and he hated that more than anything. He quickly learned the toddler equivalent of internalizing and compartmentalizing, willing to be quiet for the rest of his life if it meant his mama would be happy. 

\---  
  


Little Nigel lay awake, looking for patterns in the shadows cast along the popcorn ceiling, glowing orange in the streetlight that poured in through the shadeless window. He couldn’t focus on any one spot long enough to find the dog or rabbit or bird hidden there. Mama hadn’t come home tonight. Mimi said mama had gone to the circus, and he was sad that he didn’t get to go with her. His favourite thing to see was the lion tamer, so strong and brave, cracking whip and chair, in control of the king of the jungle. The big cats responded without fail to every command, and Nigel always clapped and laughed with delight as they were led around the ring, through hoops of fire, unquestioningly, broken animals. he was too young to understand that his fascination was more with the power the tamer held over the once vicious and feral hunters, than with the performance itself. That knowledge would come later.

Milena’s gentle, even snoring told Nigel she was finally asleep enough that he wouldn’t wake her if he moved. He slid quietly off the mattress, baby blue dachshund blanket clutched in his tiny hand, bare feet padding on bare floor as he made his way to the front door. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until mama got home. He sat by the pile of dirty, worn shoes and covered his knees with his threadbare blanket. The pendulum of the cuckoo clock hanging on the opposite wall swept from side to side. Nigel imagined he was sitting on the pendulum, rocking in and out of shadow, head heavy, eyes closing- 

A little wooden bird peeked from a tiny door in the clock and chirped three times. Through the dense fog of sleep, to Nigel, it sounded like screams. There were thuds, and yelling, pounding on floors, on walls, feet and fists, echoing far away. The front door crashed open and two bodies stumbled through, screaming- no, laughing. Instantly Nigel was on his feet, eyes wide and filling with tears.  _ Mama? _ He tried to call for her but no sound came. 

A hand slapped at the wall searching for a light switch. More laughter. 

_ Mama?? _

The bare bulb flickered to life and Nigel saw his mama tangled in the arms of a stranger. No stranger to her, it seemed, from the way they leaned on each other, whispering and laughing, his face on her neck, her lips on his wrist, his hand low on her waist, the two of them making a drunkard’s attempt at silence. 

Andrea broke away and took the man’s hand, tripping over Nigel on her way to her room. “What the fuck? Nigel, what are you doing out here??” 

Knocked back onto his bottom, Nigel held his hands out to mama, waiting for her to pick him up like she always did. 

The man slid close up behind Andrea, towering over both her and Nigel on the floor. He laughed. “This thing is yours?” He sounded surprised, but not angry. 

“Shut up, Charlie!” Andrea said, dragging him away.

Charlie reached into his jacket and pulled out a stuffed animal. “Here kid, I was going to give this to your mom, but you can have it. Thanks for letting me spend the night, I promise I’ll take care of her, okay?” He winked at Nigel. 

“Don’t be nice to him, babe. Go to bed, Nigel. No, not with me. I’ll see you tomorrow.” They tumbled into the darkness of Andrea’s room, her door with peeling paint and knee-high crayon marks shutting with such finality that even little Nigel knew she was separated from him forever. He picked up the toy that Charlie had thrown at him, a cheaply made blue dachshund. Nigel stood in the darkness with his dog and his blanket and felt the first true sadness of his long and lonely life settle into his tiny heart. At last, the tears flowed burning hot, but he wept silently, and the world around him continued to turn. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> Cățeluș - puppy  
fiică dragă - darling daughter


	2. Polaroid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an entirely fictional backstory for Nigel- potential slices of his life growing up that help us better understand the man we meet in Bucharest.

“You’re what?!” Milena failed to mask the disbelief in her voice. 

Andrea flashed the rather sizable diamond on her finger at her mother again. “Charlie proposed, mama! We’re getting married!”

Milena clutched her daughter to her chest in a desperate hug. She wanted to share in her daughter’s joy but she felt only sadness and dread. She didn’t trust Charlie; she didn’t like him. His only saving grace was the kindness he occasionally showed Nigel.

As Andrea laughed and clung to her mother she betrayed another surprise. Milena held her daughter at arm’s length and glanced from her belly back up to her face, questioning. Afraid to ask, already knowing the truth. Andrea noticed the change in Milena’s face and shrugged out of her embrace. Digging through her purse on the counter, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter that Milena had never seen before. It glimmered brighter than brass, almost as if it were made from gold. Andrea lit a cigarette and sat at the tiny table in the kitchen. “Yes, mama. I’m pregnant again, and you should be happy that Charlie is doing the right thing. I love him, mama. This will be good for us. He wants me to move in with him, he has a place in Bucharest, he has a job, a steady job, he can take care of us.” The hand holding the smoking cigarette rested on her small, round belly. 

“Us?” Milena asked.

“Of course Nigel is coming with me, I’m his mother.”

“And I’m  _ your _ mother, in case you forgot. I… I have a bad feeling about this, fiică dragă.”

Andrea scoffed. “Of course you do. I know you don’t like him, mama, but you don’t know him like I do. He said I won't need to work anymore, I can stay at home with the baby and Nigel, like a real mother.”

A real mother. Milena felt the sudden urge to weep. She knew there was no changing her daughter's mind. She felt almost as though she were grieving, maybe she was. She couldn’t bear the thought of Nigel going with them. 

Hearing his mother’s voice, Nigel wandered into the kitchen, his little arms wrapped around the blue dachshund. As if to prove her point, Andrea scooped Nigel into her lap and planted a rare kiss on his forehead. His favorite toy forgotten, he dropped it to wrap his arms around Andrea’s neck. He lived for these moments and even at his young age knew to never take them for granted. Andrea looked over Nigel’s birds nest mess of hair at her mother with a smug look of triumph, her eyes saying, “See? He loves me.” She gently rubbed his back and felt emboldened by her son’s unconditional love. “I’m almost 21, mama. Can’t you just be happy for me? Nigel is happy, aren’t you, puppy? You’re going to be a big brother, we will move with Daddy to Bucharest and have a grand adventure, yes? Things are finally looking up!” 

Without releasing her from his touch-starved grasp, little Nigel looked up to see moths, some dead, some fluttering, around the bulb above the table, and wondered naively what it was his mother saw there that made her sound so hopeful and excited. 

—-

Much of his childhood passed in snapshots, blurry polaroid flashes of too-bright figures caught against too-dark backgrounds, washed out details and faces left to lie in the sun and dust of a forgotten tabletop in a far off corner of Nigel’s mind. Not the kind of photos you cared about enough to put in albums and pass around every time someone came by to visit. If you ever even had visitors, that is. 

The condo in bucharest felt like a mansion compared to the tiny apartment they left behind in Romania. Plush carpet in every room (all the better to mute the sound of his tiny feet), every surface chrome or glass or granite, polished and shining (all the better to tattle on tiny hands leaving tiny smudges on anything they shouldn’t touch), everything felt tall (all the better to keep things out of his reach, my dear). Andrea felt like a princess; Nigel felt out of his depths. She cooed over everything, dreamed out loud of which room they would turn into the nursery when the baby came along, draped over Charlie on the couch while he worked around her, making phone calls, cigarettes piling up in the ashtrays gathered on the glass top coffee table. 

Nigel wondered if he would be given a room of his own or if he would have to share with the baby. He decided he wouldn’t mind sharing, the company would be nice. He missed sleeping next to mama, he missed mimi, he missed the small cramped box they used to call home. This new place was too big, too quiet, and even though he got to see his mama every day now, he felt further from her than ever before. 

—-

The early months of his uprooted life lay captured in a few such snapshots- everything untouchable, the brightest and harshest of which burned an afterimage that he never managed to shake.

(flash)

Andrea in a skin-tight dress, red, her pregnant belly ballooning beneath the stretchy knit fabric, her delicate feet slid into shimmery gold heels, hair teased and piled on top of her head and coated in hairspray. Charlie in his suit and tie, Italian leather shoes “polished better than the mirrors,” Andrea always teased. They are going out.

(flash)

At the top of the stairs, hushed whispers, Andrea fretting about her pregnant state, Charlie pulling her close and saying she makes it look good (and for once, he isn’t lying) 

“I hope it’s a boy,” he says, running his hands gently along Andrea’s belly, staring intently, as if he were looking into a crystal ball and willing his fortune into future. 

Andrea pouts. “Not a little girl? Daddy’s little princess?” she asks. 

“One princess is enough,” Charlie laughs, standing up to kiss her forehead. “I want a son.”

A pause. “You have a son.”

No pause. ”That bastard’s not my son, Dre.”

Even Nigel, playing in the loft, ignorant to their conversation, feels the air go cold. He puts down his blocks and peers around the corner to see Charlie looming over his mama, voice rising along with his hand

(flash)

Andrea, very small and frightened

(flash)

Charlie, tall and sharp and loud

(flash)

Nigel, between them, with his small fury and smaller fists made larger with love, and he raises his own tiny voice, “NO!” (his first word, finally, comes and goes without notice or celebration)

(flash)

mid-swing, Nigel underfoot, Charlie can’t stop, instinctively puts his hands out for balance

(flash)

Nigel, trampled, reaching for his mama to catch him

(flash)

Andrea, off balance, a tumble of red and gold down the steep, stone-and-glass condo stairs, clutching her belly and screaming

(flash)

a bright streak of pain as nigel is kicked aside by Charlie, running down the stairs, shouting, shouting, he shouts into his phone as he picks andrea up and suddenly they’re out the door and everything is silent as the grave, and Nigel observes through his pain that somehow mama has left some of the red from her dress on the carpet downstairs. 


	3. Chapter 3

Charlie moved them to a single story house packed tightly between several dozen other cookie cutter homes lining the city block. Still an upscale, immaculate space (the maid had to travel twice as far but she got paid twice as much for her trouble and was never late), still a decent part of town, but safer. Safer. 

Nigel may as well have been a ghost, he all but ceased to exist to his stepfather, who would go to his grave blaming the five year old boy for the death of the baby Andrea had been carrying. For the next two years Andrea herself drifted through the days in a haze of cigarette smoke and Vicodin. The fall had ruptured her womb and they’d been forced to remove everything. Her usefulness to Charlie seemed to begin and end with her ability to bear his seed, birth him an heir. 

Typical man, she‘d think, how archaic. She wouldn’t admit that she felt she had outlived her usefulness to anyone, though Nigel would have done or said anything to make her believe that she was still wanted… needed, if only by him. If only that had been enough. 

Laying on the couch in nothing but her dressing gown, pooling around her in satin ridges like ripples frozen in time, Andrea tapped another cigarette from the pack and felt blindly around the coffee table for her lighter. Her fingers made contact with metal casing and knocked it onto the carpet. 

“Niiiiigel,” she called, draping the hand holding the unlit cigarette over her forehead, melodramatically supine. 

Nigel immediately dropped his toys and ran down the hall just until he reached the edge of the living room carpet, where he slowed to a cautious walk. 

“Nigel,” Andrea said again. “Get mommy’s lighter, will you? I’ve dropped it again.”

Nigel quickly crawled under the table and retrieved the zippo. Its gold casing flashed in a stray beam of sunlight that slipped into the room between the shades and the smoke. He deposited it into her outstretched hand and stood there silently, watching his mother fumble weakly with the flint- all spark, no fire. By now he knew the routine. He gently took the lighter back with little resistance and lit the flame. 

Andrea smiled. “That’s my boy,” 

The little fire in Nigel’s heart bloomed like the glowing end of the cigarette in his mother’s mouth, a smoldering flare. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her. Instead he moved to put the lighter back on the table. 

“No,” Andrea rolled her head limply to look at Nigel over the top of the sunglasses she wore almost constantly. “I want you to keep it, puppy. It’s really the only thing I have to leave you.” 

He closed his hand around the lighter and clutched it to his chest. He breathed in deep, held it, exhaled. He couldn’t do it.

A ghost of something like rememberance or pride flickered across Andrea’s slackened face. “I know, I love you, baby. I really do. I’m sorry for everything. You be a good boy for me, okay?” 

Mama wasn’t making any sense. Nigel stood there, all he could do was nod. He thought of the way she closed her bedroom door all those years ago, the night she first came home with Charlie. It felt like another door was closing now, and panic began to take root at the back of his young mind. 

Andrea pulled another drag from her cigarette. “You be good, puppy.” Her eyes fluttered shut behind the tinted glasses. 

It wasn’t uncommon for Andrea to fall asleep mid conversation like this. Nigel took the cigarette from her limp hand and examined it. He brought it to his lips and left it there, unsure of what to do now. Breathe in? He sucked in a mouthful of air, pulled the nicotine and smoke into his cheeks like a chipmunk. What now? He tried swallowing, and ended up hacking and coughing. He wasn’t afraid of waking his mother, even before the “medicinal assistance” she was a heavy sleeper, never stirring when he cried out in the middle of the night, woken from dreams of shadows and blood. 

Wheezing and disgusted, Nigel dropped the cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table, leaving it to burn out on its own. He glanced once more from the lighter in his hand to his mother’s face. In a brave display of affection he only attempted because he knew she was essentially unconscious, he inched closer and gently kissed her forehead. “I love you, mama,” he whispered. 

If he had known those were the last words he’d ever speak to her, he would have tried harder to say it while she was still awake.


End file.
